I visited Umm Qasr as part of a Catholic Agency for Overseas Development (Cafod) emergency response team, and had been led to believe it was a town under control, where the needs of the people were being met.

The town is not under control. It's like the Wild West, and even the most serious humanitarian concern, water, is not being adequately administered.

Everywhere I went in Umm Qasr, people asked me for water. Wherever you look, people are carting around buckets and drums.

While tankers are being sent into the city by the Allied forces, people in the town told me that the water was being sold by the Iraqi drivers at 250 dinars for 20 litres -- the average Iraqi earns 8,000 dinars a month. The standard humanitarian quota for water in emergency situations is a minimum of 20 litres per person each day. . . .

There is a lot of anger toward Westerners in Umm Qasr, triggered by bitter disappointment at their "liberation". They feel they have been given false expectations and are scared by the breakdown in social order in the town. I saw no obvious Allied presence and the normal structures of schools, government and police has disappeared. But the people are hopeful for a future without Saddam Hussein. However bad the situation today, they told me, it was better than under Saddam's regime.

Mr. Bush's aides insist they have no intention of making Iraq the first of a series of preventive wars. Diplomacy, they argue, can persuade North Korea to give up its nuclear weapons programs. Intensive inspections can flush out a similar nuclear program in Iran. Threats and incentives can prevent Syria from sponsoring terrorism or fueling a guerrilla movement in Iraq.

Yet this week, as images of American forces closing in on Baghdad played on television screens, some of Mr. Bush's top aides insisted they were seeing evidence that leaders in North Korea and Iran, but not Syria, might be getting their point. . . .

Some hawks inside the administration are convinced that Iraq will serve as a cautionary example of what can happen to other states that refuse to abandon their programs to build weapons of mass destruction, an argument that John R. Bolton, the under secretary of state for arms control and international security, has made several times recently.

The administration's more pragmatic wing fears that the war's lesson will be just the opposite: that the best way to avoid American military action is to build a fearsome arsenal quickly and make the cost of conflict too high for Washington. . . .

Several of the hawks outside the administration who pressed for war with Iraq are already moving on to the next step, and perhaps further than the president is ready to go. R. James Woolsey, the former director of central intelligence, said on Wednesday that Iraq was the opening of a "fourth world war," after World War I, World War II and the cold war, and that America's enemies included the religious rulers in Iran, states like Syria and Islamic extremist terrorist groups.

Saddam Hussein's regime will soon be finished, and the moment for building the peace will be upon us. As soon as it arrives, there will be people who will try to hijack this peace and turn it to their own ends. Mr. Bush must be ready to fend off these hijackers, who will come in two varieties.

One group will emerge from the surrounding Arab states -- all the old-guard Arab intellectuals and Nasserites, who dominate the Arab media, along with many of the regimes and stale institutions, like the Arab League, that feel threatened by even a whiff of democracy coming from Iraq. These groups will be merciless in delegitimizing and denouncing any Iraqis who come to power after the war -- if it appears that they were installed by the U.S. . . .

The other hijackers are the ideologues within the Bush team who have been dealing with the Iraqi exile leaders and will try to install one of them, like Ahmad Chalabi, to run Iraq. I don't know any of these exiles, and I have nothing against them. But anyone who thinks they can simply be installed by America and take root in Iraqi soil is out of his mind.

Mr. Bush should visit the West Bank. It is a cautionary tale of an occupation gone wrong. It is a miserable landscape of settlements, bypass roads, barbed wire and cement walls. Why? Because the Israeli and Palestinian mainstreams spent the last 36 years, since Israel's victory in 1967, avoiding any clear decision over how to govern this land. So those extremists who had a clear idea, like the settlers and Hamas, hijacked the situation and drove the agenda.

With John F. Kennedy, however, civilian power at the Defense Department came to its apogee. The combination of an inexperienced president and a take-charge secretary of defense, Robert McNamara, led to a total shake-up. The secretary imported a coterie of hard-driving academics -- including two Harvard law professors, John McNaughton and Adam Yarmolinsky -- to help him take effective operational control of the sprawling defense establishment.

For the first time, the office of the secretary had the requisite staff and intellectual capacity to wrest military decision-making from the services. Under Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, civilian judgment supplanted battle-tested precedent, and the United States carried out the eminently logical but tactically catastrophic escalation in Vietnam.

In the decades after, presidents tended to be hands-off and the relative power of the civilians in the Pentagon ebbed. The Powell doctrine of overwhelming force came to hold sway, and in the 1991 Persian Gulf war the military called the shots. Political control was not relinquished -- Dick Cheney, then the secretary of defense, fired the Air Force chief of staff, Gen. Mike Dugan, for talking out of turn -- but for the most part traditional command relations resumed.

Until now. The current administration bears an uncanny resemblance to that of John F. Kennedy: an inexperienced, somewhat detached president and a decisive, high-profile secretary of defense have teamed to once again assume operational control. Donald Rumsfeld's defense intellectuals -- an oxymoron akin to "military music" -- have done precisely what Robert McNamara's whiz kids did in 1961: substitute their theoretical concepts for traditional doctrine. The ideological slant is different -- this time it's neoconservatism -- but the effect on the decision-making process is the same.

History rarely repeats itself, and the failures of Vietnam do not necessarily mean today's transition is unwise or unworkable. What we saw last week, however, was that this time the men with the stars on their shoulders aren't going to take it sitting down.

The United States has officially informed South Korea that it intends to pull back its troops from inter-Korean border areas during the second half this year, government sources said yesterday.

"In a video conference on March 24, Richard Lawless, the Pentagon's top policymaker on Korea, told his South Korean counterpart, Lieutenant General Cha Young-koo, about Washington's intention to move the U.S. 2d Infantry Division to the area south of the Han River during the second half of this year," a senior government official said on condition of anonymity. . . .

General Cha tried to persuade Mr. Lawless that relocating the 2d Infantry Division this year is impossible, due to the difficulty of finding an alternate site, the official said. General Cha also stressed that the relocation should be implemented after the North Korea's nuclear aspirations are resolved.

Mr. Lawless reportedly did not mention any force cut.

The U.S. 2d Infantry Division, about 15,000 strong, is the largest American unit in South Korea. Most of the division is deployed in Dongducheon, Gyeonggi province, 25 kilometers (15 miles) southeast of the inter-Korean Military Demarcation Line. The division headquarters is in Uijeongbu, 35 kilometers southeast of the border. Stationed within range of North Korea's conventional artillery, the troops have been seen as a "tripwire," assurance of automatic U.S. involvement in the event of a North Korean attack. U.S. officials, however, recently have reacted sensitively to this description. Washington has long demanded that Pyeongyang withdraw its conventional weapons deployed along the border.

A colony of potential US administrators has assembled in waiting, along a stretch of Kuwaiti seaside villas, speaking well or not-so-well of the man regarded as the real architect of the new order, Paul Wolfowitz, deputy to Rumsfeld at the Pentagon, or 'Wolfowitz of Arabia' as he's been dubbed.

But Washington itself is riven over these arrangements, with hostility again spilling over between Powell and Rumsfeld, as in the lead-off to war. The infighting has been so acrimonious that - The Observer is told - Garner has even told associates he has considered resigning before he has begun.

The debates are over the role - or not - of the United Nations, and the part that Iraqi exiles are to play. Pentagon sources tell The Observer that they are determined to sideline the UN and to impose the Rumsfeld plan. 'This war proceeds without the UN,' said one official. 'There is no need for the UN, which is not relevant, to be involved in building a democratic Iraq.'

UN official Shashi Tharoor said that the body was keen to join the humanitarian relief effort and participate in governing the country, but only if mandated by the Security Council.

However, many relief organisations - including Oxfam and Medecins Sans Frontiers - have said they will refuse to operate under such arrangements. Thirteen leading non-governmental aid groups have sent a letter to George Bush urging him to 'ask the UN to serve as the humanitarian coordinator for Iraq'.

U.S. officials said the dispatch of "free Iraqis" from the north to the south -- including Iraqi opposition leader Ahmed Chalabi -- was designed to prevent chaos as looting was reported in southern Iraq. As U.S. forces make progress in eliminating armed resistance, they must find ways to stabilize and administer villages, towns and cities no longer under Hussein's control. Defense officials believed the moment was ripe to bring in Iraqi assistance.

But Chalabi's associates believe his arrival could also bolster his position in the scramble for leadership in the post-Hussein period, a goal long sought by his supporters in the Pentagon. "The forces advocating working with him got a huge shot in the arm over the weekend," said Randy Scheunemann, executive director of the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq. "It changes the complexion of the exile leader debate pretty dramatically."

The State Department has strenuously opposed a leading role for Chalabi, a London-based banker who left in Iraq in 1958, believing he lacks credibility and support. But State Department officials said yesterday they were willing to accept this new assignment for Chalabi and his compatriots because it was necessary to stabilize the country and get broader Iraqi involvement in what has been viewed overseas as a largely U.S.-led operation. . . .

Other Pentagon officials also said they were not trying to anoint Chalabi, but that the war had evolved to the point where U.S. commanders could spare the planes to fly the Iraqis in and make the effort to incorporate them into the battle plan. Also, there was a political assessment in Washington that now would be a good time to do something more that would show the Iraqis coming forward and participating in their own liberation.

In one of the fiercest Bay Area demonstrations since the Iraq war began, dozens of war protesters were injured Monday at the Port of Oakland when police fired tear gas and projectiles to break up a crowd that failed to heed warnings to disperse.

The largest of several protests across the region that targeted federal and corporate institutions seen as profiting from the war, the skirmish resulted in the arrests of 31 of about 500 protesters who blocked a port gate for more than an hour -- and prompted two Oakland city councilwomen to call for an investigation into police behavior. . . .

Among the injured were nine members of the longshore workers union who were waiting to get into their work site and not participating in the demonstration, said union representative Clarence Thomas. A union official, Jack Heyman, was arrested.

Disturbed and powerless, but also filled with anger, we are witnessing the moral decline of the world's only superpower, burdened by the knowledge that only one consequence of this organized madness is certain: Motivation for more terrorism is being provided, for more violence and counter-violence. Is this really the United States of America, the country we fondly remember for any number of reasons? The generous benefactor of the Marshall Plan? The forbearing instructor in the lessons of democracy? The candid self-critic? The country that once made use of the teachings of the European Enlightenment to throw off its colonial masters and to provide itself with an exemplary constitution? Is this the country that made freedom of speech an incontrovertible human right?

It is not just foreigners who cringe as this ideal pales to the point where it is now a caricature of itself. There are many Americans who love their country too, people who are horrified by the betrayal of their founding values and by the hubris of those holding the reins of power. I stand with them. By their side, I declare myself pro-American. I protest with them against the brutalities brought about by the injustice of the mighty, against all restrictions of the freedom of expression, against information control reminiscent of the practices of totalitarian states and against the cynical equations that make the death of thousands of women and children acceptable so long as economic and political interests are protected. . . .

Many people find themselves in a state of despair these days, and with good reason. Yet we must not let our voices, our no to war and yes to peace, be silenced. What has happened? The stone that we pushed to the peak is once again at the foot of the mountain. But we must push it back up, even with the knowledge that we can expect it to roll back down again.

If popular opinion in the Middle East is united on anything, it is that oil -- not terrorism, not regional stability and not any intention to bring democracy to the Iraq -- is the real reason the United States decided to oust Saddam Hussein. In Jordan, a longtime ally of Washington, a recent poll showed that 83 percent of people there think that the United States wants to control Iraq's oil. . . .

Throughout the 1920's, Britain, France and the United States (which denounced the "imperialism" of the other two) jockeyed for control of Iraq's oil. It was not until after World War II that Iraq began to gain some measure of control of its own. It was a founding member of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, the first meeting of which was held in Baghdad in 1960, and nationalized its oil industry in 1972. . . .

So far, the Bush administration has consistently said that Iraqi oil belongs solely to the Iraqis, but it has also said it intends to control how the country is rebuilt. On Tuesday, industry experts who had spoken to administration officials said that Philip J. Carroll, a former chief executive of Shell Oil Company, the American arm of the Royal Dutch/Shell Group, had emerged as the leading candidate for the job. The administration declined comment. . . .

One move that would be welcome, at least by the Iraqis and some Arab leaders, is if the United States opened the books on how the oil revenues are used, regional experts said.

A recent report by Human Rights Watch found that oil money usually subverts democracy by making a country's leaders unaccountable to its citizens. The United States could work with Iraqis to disclose the sources of oil revenue and the awarding of contracts, the report said. The group also encouraged independent auditing of the oil company's books, and the creation of a trust fund, similar to a system Norway has for investing a portion of the profits to benefit future generations.

Nothing embodies the Bush administration's shortsightedness and moral bankruptcy more than its plan to employ former Air Force Gen. Jay Garner as the head of the Pentagon's rebuilding effort for Iraq. Not only does Garner have interests in companies like SY Technologies, which stand to profit from the war in Iraq, but he is a longtime associate of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, a right-wing, pro-Likud think tank that has long supported "regime change" in Iraq while denigrating the Camp David peace process as an inappropriate way to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

If the Bush administration were to consciously set out to pick a person most likely to raise questions about the legitimacy of the post-war rebuilding process, they could not have selected a better man for the job than Jay Garner. But if they truly want a stable, democratic Iraq, they should send Mr. Garner packing and start immediate bargaining to bring the United Nations -- and anti-war allies like France, Germany and Russia -- into the center of the rebuilding process.

As the coalition proceeds with the reconstruction of Iraq, it will work with its allies, bilateral donors, and with the United Nations and other international institutions.

The United Nations has a vital role to play in the reconstruction of Iraq. We welcome the effort of UN agencies and non-governmental organisations in providing immediate assistance to the people of Iraq.

As we stated in the Azores, we plan to seek the adoption of new United Nations Security Council resolution that would affirm Iraq's territorial integrity, ensure rapid delivery of humanitarian relief and endorse an appropriate post-conflict administration for Iraq.

We welcome the appointment by the United Nations Secretary General of a special adviser for Iraq to work with the people of Iraq and coalition representatives.

The day when Iraqis govern themselves must come quickly. As early as possible. We support the formation of an Iraqi interim authority, a transitional administration, run by Iraqis until a permanent government is established by the people of Iraq.

The interim authority will be broad-based and fully representative, with members from all Iraqis ethnic groups, regions and Diaspora.

The interim authority will be established first and foremost by the Iraqi people, with the help of the members of the coalition, and working with the Secretary-General of the United Nations.

As coalition forces advance, civilian Iraqi leaders will emerge who can be part of such an interim authority. The interim authority will progressively assume more of the functions of government.

It will provide a means for Iraqis to participate in the economic and political reconstruction of their country from the out-set.

Coalition forces will remain in Iraq as long as necessary to help the Iraqi people to build their own political institutions and reconstruct their country, but no longer. . . .

Ahmed Chalabi is one of the great survivors of Iraqi opposition politics. He has a controversial past, a long list of enemies but is also politically agile, tough and persistent. . . .

Mr Chalabi's weakness is that there is no evidence the INC has any support among Iraqis. He will find it difficult not to be seen as an American pawn if he has a prominent position in any interim administration.

Perhaps, as Geoff Hoon, the Secretary of State for Defence, says, the Iraqi mothers of children killed by cluster bombs may "one day" thank the Allies. I'd say instead that in a curious way, we are now approaching the high water mark of the invasion's moral force. In the next few weeks the US and Britain are likely to receive as much thanks from the liberated people of Iraq as they will ever get.

The "battle for hearts and minds" must end when the battle does. Above all, as the regime collapses, Iraqis will be sickened by the propaganda they have been fed, and suspicious of propaganda that may be fed to them in the future. What the people of this country need now is the space to make up their own minds, and follow their own hearts, instead of the assault on these organs moving from the physical and psychological to the purely psychological.

When the war ends, it is important that Iraqi civil society is given time and space to make its own evaluation of what has been done, and whether the Iraqi people would have chosen it had they been able to. The US-UK forces should take all the help from other countries they can get in maintaining the order necessary for this process.

It is important, too, that the international community listen to the conclusions of the Iraqi people. Much can be learned from such an action, as long as the US-UK leaders don't persist with their belief that they know all the answers already.

Tony Blair and the US president, George Bush, have once more failed to clarify the UN's role in a post-Saddam Iraq, in their third meeting in less than three weeks.

Speaking at a joint press conference at Hillsborough castle in Northern Ireland, the two men were pressed repeatedly on what a "vital role" for the United Nations may mean.

Mr Bush defined it both as "food, medicine, aid, contributions" and "helping the interim government stand up until the real government shows up".

Mr Blair intervened to say that the "important thing is to not get into some battle over a word here or there, but for the international community to come together ... rather than endless diplomatic wrangles."

But, taking only four questions in a 25-minute press briefing, Mr Bush warned: "When we say a vital role for the UN we mean a vital role."

In Egypt, they queued to sign up for jihad after learning US tanks were rolling into Baghdad. In Oman, they erupted with cries of "God is great" when they heard an Iraqi official denying it. And across the Middle East, Arabs urged Saddam Hussein not to give up.

Despite the dismay many Arabs feel about the US incursion into the heart of Iraq, some are still holding out hope that President Saddam will live up to his promise to slaughter the allied troops at the gates of Baghdad. . . .

In Muscat, men watched the news with angry and resentful faces. One shouted: "Where is your army, Saddam?" Another, not believing the television pictures, grumbled: "These Americans are relying on false propaganda!"

A short while later, many felt vindicated when the Iraqi information minister, Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf, denied allied reports.

Scores of Egyptians lined up outside Cairo's Lawyers' Syndicate, a professional union that has been organising people to join the war, more determined to join other Arabs who have gone into Iraq to wage jihad alongside the Iraqis. "As Arabs, we cannot see this and not move," said a man who refused to give his name. "We are selling ourselves for a higher cost, for God, not for Saddam."

Ali Oqla Orsan, head of the Arab Writers' Union in Damascus, said: "If the allied forces occupy Iraq, it would signal the beginning of a liberation war against the colonialists."

Halper is an Israeli anthropologist, until his retirement a year ago a professor at Ben Gurion University, a transplant 30 years ago from Minnesota, a harsh critic of Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, and, as founder of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD), one of the leading peace and anti-occupation activists in Israel.

Halper tries to be upbeat. He sees the "roadmap" drawn up by the U.S. and its Quartet partners as a promising document because, among a few other straws to grasp at, it actually uses the word "occupation," which Israel itself refuses to use. He wants to mobilize and coordinate pro-Palestinian groups in Israel/Palestine and elsewhere around the world to insert themselves into the process and try to work with their governments to have some input in implementing the plan. He recently talked to a State Department official who was hopeful. But for the most part, what Halper says is gloomy and pessimistic.

Congress is the principal problem in the U.S., he believes, which makes it particularly hard for President Bush. For Bush really to move on the issue, it would "cost him a lot of political capital." He thinks it's an open question whether Bush will ever be willing to pay that cost, so he is latching onto the "roadmap." But then, right after declaring the roadmap a promising document, he says, "Either you just get rid of the occupation, period, or the two-state solution is gone. If Israel keeps the main settlement blocs, it'll control 90% of the West Bank." But the roadmap shows little promise of "just getting rid of the occupation, period."

At the end, Halper returns to the issue of Israeli fears and his blunt assessment of where Israel's actual thinking is centered. "It's not fear," he says. "We're just pissed off [at the Palestinians], the way whites were with blacks in the southern United States. They just don't know their place."

The objectives are very positive. They are identical with the aims of the Israeli peace movement: an end to the occupation, the establishment of the independent State of Palestine side-by-side with the State of Israel, Israeli-Palestinian and Israeli-Syrian peace, the integration of Israel in the region.

In this respect, the Road Map goes further than the Oslo agreement. In the Oslo "Declaration of Principles" there was a giant hole: it did not spell out what was to come after the long interim stages. Without a clear final aim, the interim stages had no clear purpose. Therefore the Oslo process died with Yitzhaq Rabin. . . .

[W]ho is this "Quartet" that has to decide at every point whether the two parties have fulfilled their obligations, and a new phase can be entered?

At first glance, there is a balance between the four players: the United Nations, the United States, Europe and Russia. . . . The United States are close to Israel, Europe and Russia are acceptable to the Palestinians. . . .

[However], the Quartet must take all decisions unanimously. The Americans have a veto, which means that Sharon has a veto. Without his agreement, nothing can be decided. Need more be said?

The truth is, in this whole document there is not one word that Sharon could not accept. After all, with the help of Bush he can torpedo any step at any time.

To sum up: Much Ado about Nothing. As evidenced by the fact that neither Sharon nor the settlers are upset.

In making the case for the invasion, the administration suggested that Iraq's arsenal might be quite large: up to 500 tons of nerve and mustard agents, and 30,000 munitions capable of delivering them; materials to produce 25,000 liters of anthrax and 38,000 liters of botulinum toxin; and mobile or underground laboratories to make germ weapons. If so, it should be possible to find them with the help of Iraqi scientists and officers. But for any findings to be credible in the battle for global opinion, neutral analysts -- from the United Nations or technically proficient nations like Finland or Switzerland -- will be needed to verify the laboratory results and ensure a strict chain of custody to avoid charges of tampering with the evidence.

The wider global impact of this war was spelled out by North Korea's foreign ministry this week. "The Iraqi war shows," it declared, with unerring logic, "that to allow disarmament through inspections does not help avert a war, but rather sparks it", concluding that "only a tremendous military deterrent force" can prevent attacks on states the US dislikes.

As the administration hawks circle round Syria and Iran, a powerful boost to nuclear proliferation and anti western terror attacks seems inevitable, offset only by the likelihood of a growing international mobilisation against the new messianic imperialism. The risk must now be that we will all pay bitterly for the reckless arrogance of the US and British governments.

Arab states, grappling to adjust to the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime, are unlikely to recognise a new Iraqi government for at least several months, diplomatic sources said yesterday. . . .

There are also questions about Iraq's membership of the Arab League, which could be temporarily suspended. Iraq's permanent representative at the league's headquarters in Cairo will be expected to leave after the fall of the regime, but it is unclear what will happen then. . . .

Some Arabs suspect that a new Iraqi government could be induced by the Americans to recognise Israel, which at present has full diplomatic relations with only two of the 22 Arab League members - Egypt and Jordan.

The President is merely the most important among a large number of public servants. He should be supported or opposed exactly to the degree which is warranted by his good conduct or bad conduct, his efficiency or inefficiency in rendering loyal, able, and disinterested service to the Nation as a whole. Therefore it is absolutely necessary that there should be full liberty to tell the truth about his acts, and this means that it is exactly necessary to blame him when he does wrong as to praise him when he does right. Any other attitude in an American citizen is both base and servile. To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public. Nothing but the truth should be spoken about him or any one else. But it is even more important to tell the truth, pleasant or unpleasant, about him than about any one else.

The administration's postwar plans for Iraq are still being fought over internally, but three distinct themes appear to feature prominently: promoting democracy, limiting American involvement, and keeping the rest of the international community at arm's length. Many observers find this troika somewhat baffling, because they see no way of achieving all three objectives simultaneously. What they fail to appreciate are the magical powers attributed by administration hawks to the Iraqi opposition, and in particular to one opposition group known as the Iraqi National Congress. Just as before, people like Pentagon adviser Richard Perle think the INC can leap easily over the obstacles others worry about and will thus be able to transform Iraq in a flash.

Unfortunately, the INC is as ill-prepared to pull off a postwar miracle as it would have been for a wartime wonder. It can boast some heroic individual members, such as the dissident intellectual Kanan Makiya, but it has negligible military power, administrative capacity, or local backing. Iraq experts joke that the group has fewer supporters on the Tigris than on the Potomac.

The Iraqi opposition parties, long-time bitter rivals, resumed their squabbling yesterday within 24 hours of statues of Saddam being toppled in Baghdad. A putative bid to establish an early interim government at a special meeting of the exile groups billed for Nassiriya, in southern Iraq, has already created chaos.

The US state department and the Pentagon were at odds yesterday concerning the Nassiriya meeting - for which a date has not been fixed - and over who should be in the new government. . . .

The row in Washington over Mr Chalabi's suitability for power is symptomatic of a lack of preparedness by the US. The meticulous planning that went into the military campaign has not been matched by post-Saddam preparations. This follows a predictable US pattern, in which its military prowess has not been matched by peacekeeping or nation-building. . . .

One of the biggest divisions is between Mr Chalabi's INC and the powerful Iranian-backed Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (Sciri), which played a big part in earlier anti-Saddam revolts and which has a big following among Shias. Sciri has thrown into doubt whether the Nassiriya meeting will go ahead.

Sciri said yesterday it had yet to decide whether to participate. A spokesman said a boycott was unlikely, contradicting a spokesman who said 24 hours earlier the group would not attend in protest at the US military presence in Iraq.

"We are discussing this because we must know who the participants are, what the aims and plans for this meeting are, then we'll decide," said Mohsen Hakim, an aide to the Sciri leader, Ayatollah Mohammad Bakir Hakim. "I doubt that Sciri will boycott the meeting."

The ayatollah has spent the past 20 years in the Iranian capital, Tehran, which makes him suspect to US officials. The ayatollah, who has a 10,000-strong militia under his sway, said he will soon return to Iraq.

The repercussions of this war will not be confined within Iraq's borders. The idea of an international community based on multilateral rules and institutions lies in ruins as the prospect of a world dominated by the hegemonic preferences of a solitary power hoves into view. The real tragedy will not lie in the imposition of American authority on an unwilling world as much as in the embittered response of those who refuse to submit to it.

The Arab world has been inflamed by this war and will draw the conclusion that since American power cannot be confronted on its own terms, it must be dealt with asymmetrically. Like the young Catholics who signed up to fight for the IRA after Bloody Sunday, young men from Cairo to Amman will now beat a path to the door of anyone able to provide them with the means to hit back. As of today, that door is Osama bin Laden's. The dividing line between Arab nationalism and Islamic fundamentalism, once so clear, has become even more dangerously blurred as a result of our actions.

None of this is inevitable. But there is precious little evidence to suggest that the White House is interested in taking the sort of steps needed to prevent it. Bush may agree to the publication of the road map for a Middle East peace settlement, but he has no intention of taking the journey. He talks about a democratic Iraq, but his first priority is a compliant Iraq.

The war has made politics more global by emphasising the centrality of American power, by offering the first test since Vietnam of what happens when an American endeavour is opposed by most of the rest of the planet, by engaging the US and the Muslim world more intimately, although not amiably, and by showing how American and European political developments can no longer even begin to be divorced from one another.

It has taken one stage further the processes which began with September 11. The world, to put it another way, is even more wired together, for good or ill. There is irony in the fact that this unilateralist war has produced a situation which will both confirm the Bush administration in its unilateralist instincts, and at the same time entangle it in inevitably more complex multilateral situations. The preparations for the war, with the juggler dropping first the plate marked United Nations and then the cup marked Turkey, are an indication of difficulties to come.

"Shock and Awe" wasn't a misplaced phrase. We just had the date wrong. It came yesterday, with the collapse of Baghdad. And it came not in Baghdad or Kirkuk or Basra but in Cairo, Beirut, Riyadh, Amman and other capitals around the Arab world.